


i climb in bed with the thunder

by bleakmidwinter



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Beds, Character Study, F/M, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Post-Fall (Hannibal), Post-Season/Series 03, Sex, Snapshots of Will's life, Wolftrap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:28:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24745351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bleakmidwinter/pseuds/bleakmidwinter
Summary: Will's perception of sleeping and spending time in bed has changed over the years.
Relationships: Molly Graham/Will Graham, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 20
Kudos: 223





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a quote from Amanda Mosher's "Better to be able to love than to be Loveable"

**1.**

A bed to Will, is a hard mattress, and a rumpled bundle of sheets as a pillow. His pillows usually get dragged off the bed by dogs, or kicked or thrown by his own limbs.

It is waking in the middle of the night drowning in his own sweat and his drool, occasionally tasting the salt of tears on his dry lips. 

Waking up in his bed mimics the agonizing feeling of dragging one’s naked body across a gritty cement walkway. It is the most unpleasant feeling of his daily existence, and yet in his classroom as he drones on about forensics and psychology, he yearns to be back under the sheets. Away from the world, the expectations that can’t find him beneath the covers. 

Occasionally when he first lays down for the night, one or two of the dogs will hop up on the bed and curl up beside him. It is a moment’s reprieve, to have the scent of a wet dog wafting under his nose, or their fur tickling his bare ankles.

It is the calm before the storm when he dreams of black lakes, a stag on distant plains urging him to follow into the red, hot, dark of the night. He wakes up screaming or gasping for breath. Sometimes, he wakes up frozen, cold, and shivering. He is unable to move and he witnesses shadows beyond his peripheral, mocking his paralysis. 

It is routine. It is natural. The beast within is calmed by the ordinary conventions that come with the nightmares. The screaming is like a blanket, it helps to release the demons. 

Rare is a situation where Will finds himself hard and aching in the so-called ‘comfort’ of his bed. Where there is little comfort, scarcely is there a minuscule amount of pleasure found. Some days when it is so cold he couldn’t sweat if he screamed for hours, he is relaxed enough to shift against his mattress or a pillow between his thighs in just the right way and his cock grows hard as his thoughts grow foggy.

He jerks himself to release in the quickest, most banal way possible. 

Sometimes the pleasure doesn’t peak, sometimes he goes soft in his own hand as he groans into his pillow and curses his lonesome. The fog slips through his fingers quite easily; it is hard to hold onto something so immediate and merciful as release.

Desperate for real sex and mortified at the thought of going out and finding it are what cause his sexual dissonance. His bed is rarely a place for sexual pleasure, only on scarce occasions. Even then, he feels empty after. As if he could have taken a cold shower and strung out a much better reaction from himself than he does whilst having an orgasm. 

Even when he begins to dream of Alana, her silky black hair brushing over his shoulders as she rides his cock slow and gentle, whispering lovely thoughts in his ear, it is difficult to drive himself over the edge.

A wave of guilt washes over him quite often. Guilt for not being enough for her. Guilt that he resorts to benign visions of friends, simple crushes, to get off. 

When he _is_ able to come, he experiences the most horrendous nightmares. 

Sometimes he lays in bed and thinks about his father. How he used to crawl into his bed when he was young enough not to be able to reach the top of the stove. How his father would grab him by the ear in a vice like pinch, dragging him painfully back to his own small twin bed. He’d throw him in and shout a warning, perhaps with a few slurs painted throughout his words. Like art. 

Will grew to know the darkness that accompanied him in his sleep, like an old friend. He found comfort and solace in the nightmares and the wretched fears that haunted him in the early hours of morning. If he hadn’t, he would not have survived. 


	2. Chapter 2

**2.**

Having a bed is not something Will thinks about most days anymore.

He is on the schedule of an average, blue collared, American man. He fixes boats in the mornings, or bikes. Occasionally a motorcycle for his neighbor who takes to city trips more often than not. Truly anything with some form of an engine, he tinkers with. It is a good distraction. He always wakes up before Molly. 

Will does not wake up between screams any longer. He wakes up feeling an odd sense of familiarity when he first sees a bundle of golden locks on the pillow beside his own. There is a commonplace aspect to the situation that sits like a ball of poison in the pit of his stomach. It feels wrong to feel normal.

He does it anyway. When Wally asks him to fix one of his bed posts, he does so like a doting step-father eager for his new son’s praise. However, he finds he barely cares if Wally accepts him. It is merely what must be done. 

Will does not look forward to sleeping and he does not fear getting up from the comfort of the warm quilt in the early mornings; it is a heavy weight over his chest. 

It is pleasurable to find that he can have a healthy amount of sex in his bed, with Molly. They cannot make noises that are more than hushed moans and gasps. It is for the child, but it is also not much of a difficult task. Will is not a noise-maker. He gladly watches Molly writhe in front of him as he slides in and out of the slick wet heat between her thighs. He kisses her sweet tasting neck, nibbling at her ear sensually. 

She always takes, and gives just the right amount back. When he becomes short of breath and her whines are almost too loud to be acceptable, they come together. A new routine he fancies well. Will throws the condom away, returning to the bed to a sleeping wife, and he finds himself unable to stave off the threat of sleep.

He still has nightmares. It’s nothing like the screaming agony he is used to. It is nothing like the cold tremors that run through his body when he makes eye contact with the nightly stag-shaped beast in his dreamscape. He dreams of empty fields in the cold, blue, mornings. He dreams that he is fishing and yet there is an absence beside him he cannot name. He dreams of dinners and breakfasts with Hannibal.

Sometimes he wakes with the taste of syrup lingering on his tongue, or feels as if his mouth is full from an ortolan. The burn in his throat from a scream he had not experienced or heard. He buries the memories of the dreams instantly, every time, though his blood runs cold throughout the day. 

It becomes repetitive. As the days turn into years, it becomes harder to survive with the cold. He feels as if he is freezing from the inside out. 

Molly’s warm embrace in conjunction with the warmth of the quilt is searing, not soothing. He does not fear their bed, or the nighttime, or waking, when he might have regularly been comforted by the fear those events brought. 

However, the bed is meaningless to him. The clock ticks by and the days drone on and he is alone and cold. Physical warmth and pleasure brings him nothing but more and more cold. The sheets tangle up occasionally, and he feels trapped. Empty.


	3. Chapter 3

**3.**

The bed is the first thing Will understands about his position when he wakes. 

After a plunge into the dark sea beneath the bluff he barely remembers the sensations of being fished out of the ocean like a cod, thrown into a shocked haze from the stifling pain and cold. He wakes in a bed, bandaged, and bruised the next time consciousness greets him. He feels warm and not alone.

It is the first time he has ever experienced the full and entirely body-wracking sensation of pure relief. When he sees Hannibal is joined with him in a similar predicament, the feeling intensifies until his fingers are curled around Hannibal’s. 

Like two corpses laid out for presentation. But, together. 

Beds to Will become something more than they have ever been. It is a place of healing, both emotionally and physically. The mattress is soft when he never expected one could be. Hannibal is soft when he finds himself wrapped up in him in the early mornings. 

When they are standing and mulling around the boat for months, navigating with Chiyoh their future locations, there is pain and ache. Sometimes the stark nudge of guilt finds him readily at the bow of the ship. It is a sickly feeling that lingers in his toes all the way up to his ears, as if he could vomit and still feel the remnants. 

It is rare he finds himself standing, not in the early days of their departure. He finds comfort in the bed, where Hannibal usually resides, where he can lay and feel his wounds stitching themselves back together, the healthy sting and itch of his body remedying itself. 

Hannibal is by his side at night, a routine, but not an unwelcome one. The kind where anticipation stirs low in his belly, and he feels gratification at the mere feeling of the mattress dipping with Hannibal’s weight. His body lights up where Hannibal touches him, either to wrap an arm around him or nose at his shoulder.

Intimacy was never negotiated. It was something natural. Just as sleep becomes a welcome darkness that neither frightens nor excites.

Their bed rocks with the boat in the night. Chiyoh sleeps in the day, but knowing she is outside their cabin while they sleep does not bother him. 

He does not care if she witnesses their intimacy.

Months into their establishment on land, they remain thorough with their routine. Wounds heal much slower than Will had remembered. The slowness is a gift after years of a fabricated, dull, facade forcing him to drudge through his own life as if he were knee deep in thick, chilly, mud. 

All he knows about their location is that it is somewhere in Argentina. By the water, a small house that Hannibal had apparently purchased in his youth.

The bed remains a sanctuary. Restful nights without nightmares are spent in Hannibal’s arms, and he slowly becomes conditioned to be instantly comforted by the feel of the sheets and the mattress which are impossibly softer than the ones from the boat. 

In the mornings, he dreads removing himself from the thick embrace of the man beside him. He does not want to interact with the cool breeze that comes with lifting the blankets up and off of him. He does not want the pain that comes with waking fully, standing on his own two feet. The promise that he can return to the heat and comfort of the bed later that night is always the one thing that forces him up.

Will thinks, this is what being normal must feel like. To leech onto the comfort of relaxation, knowing himself completely enough to enjoy the luxury of well-being.

It becomes apparent when their wounds heal further, when they become an almost imperceptible ache accompanying their strolls in the woods behind the house, or their journey to the lake to fish. It used to burn as if it were swelling, his cheek. Now he only feels an ache if he laughs for an extended period of time. 

Their newfound strength and health manifests itself in the way that they spend their nights. Hannibal grows closer, not afraid to grip tighter to skin and press up against him in a firm manner. Will is not frightened to press back, knowing that his bullet wound has long since ached to the point of him retreating back into a protective shell. 

While sex was not foremost on their minds as they settled into their new place in this lifetime, it becomes a nagging reality that looms over the both of them late at night, in the moments before sleep where they both focus idly on the breathing patterns of the other.

Will is unsure when it first occurs. Hannibal is pressed up against his back, kisses his neck as he sometimes does, his lips lingering below the nape of his neck. There is a wanton burn that comes from the slide of his teeth over Will’s shoulder blade. Will has told him he finds it comforting, that Hannibal still desires to devour him. Comforting because he yearns for him and yet refuses himself the opportunity to maim. 

He is also unsure as to when this action becomes something arousing to Will. It was inevitable they would be together in all the ways two men can be intimate, unavoidable really. It is a stark and exhilarating realization when one night his cock begins to fill, grow hard with anticipation. He tries to calm himself and not focus too hard on Hannibal’s fingers sliding over his belly button, brushing his naval. 

He wants to tell Hannibal he’s aroused, he’s not ashamed. He knows Hannibal wants it as much as he does. He’d probably be delighted to realize his ministrations have finally caused an intense reaction within Will he hasn’t experienced in a long time.

Sexual pleasure was something that was always commonplace. He’s sometimes found himself with an erection in his house in Wolftrap, and the scent of Molly could spark something in his gut similar to arousal and desire.

However, with Hannibal, it is all encompassing. Feelings that have translated from nightly comforts into something primal. Instinctive.

He’s certain Hannibal smells his arousal when he presses against the back of him, specifically pushing his hips slightly up against the curve of Will’s backside to show his interest. Will presses back, more obviously, grinding against Hannibal’s soft cock. He delights in being the one to bring it to hardness. 

It slowly becomes more than a small intimate moment. Gradually, like a stream of water down a steep hill. He leans his head back a few inches, until his cheek is pressed to Hannibal’s temple. Arousal sparks with every movement Hannibal makes, breathing heavy in his neck as he grinds harder against Will.

Will lets out a breathy whine, allowing himself to be entirely enveloped in the ecstasy of the moment. He finds Hannibal’s hand on his hip with his own, intertwines their fingers just enough to direct his hand to his own cock. 

Hannibal takes the hint gladly, slipping under the waistband of Will’s pajama bottoms and circling a warm fist around his straining cock. Will grunts, bucking in Hannibal’s grasp. He turns his head a fraction, just enough to kiss the side of Hannibal’s face, taste his skin. Hannibal turns to catch the side of his lips in his own. It’s messy, and it is open-mouthed and uncoordinated. It is everything Will wants. 

Hannibal tightens his grip on Will’s cock, and Will lets out a small moan, nuzzling Hannibal’s forehead, begging for more. Will reaches down and shoves down his pants just enough, reaches back and pulls Hannibal’s cock out of his, lines it up against the crease of his ass and grinds against it more firmly. Hannibal’s breath catches, and they continue undulating against each other, skin to skin, kissing any skin they can find, until they work themselves up to a mutual release.

Will makes a high-pitched sound, slightly strangled as he drowns in his own bliss. Hannibal’s hand steadily moves over his slick cock as his release coats it. With a small gasp at the nape of his neck and the threat of teeth over the top of his spine, Will can feel a similar slickness trickling between his thighs and between the crease of his ass. 

While he comes down, Hannibal somehow finds a towel and is cleaning them off with practiced ease. His eyes are fluttering shut, exhaustion taking hold of him like someone dragging him underwater. He turns before sleep can overpower him, sees Hannibal licking what is remaining of Will’s release from his fingers. He smiles down at Will.

An animal of many desires. Will thinks nothing of the warmth he feels at the sight. He grows closer to Hannibal, and allows him to make him feel safe.

The bed becomes something Will connects with sex.

In Wolftrap it had been a tedious task, but necessary occasionally to bring himself to release. With Molly, it had been an expectation of the institution of marriage. With Hannibal, the scent of their bed, the feel of the silk sheets stir arousal within him into something dark and heavy. It makes him want to tear and shout and _take_. 

He’d never been sexually explorative. Hannibal had taught him things he’d never dreamed of trying with anyone else. He spends most nights with Hannibal deep inside of him, drawing out expletives and breathy shouts. 

Going to bed after a long day, following a delightful dinner, or the occasional murder of a local citizen who was rude to him in public one too many times, ends with gratifying their desire for each other, a flame that never seems to diminish. 

Their bedroom is Will’s favorite room in the house. A room where he can set himself free, go completely and utterly wild with passion. A place where he can wake up, not from a sleepless night, but in the arms of the part of himself he had always been missing.

The bed brings peace.

**Author's Note:**

> i rewatched hannibal again so here we are sorry, also sorry for the quality of my writing. the pandemic has low-key ruined my ability to be good at writing. hopefully i'll be back to normal one day lol.


End file.
